Dishing up Digg Data

While there are still several people entering this site from Digg, I think the traffic levels have died down to the point where we can take a look at the data and get a good feel of what benefit hitting the front page of Digg had. There have been a lot of posts like this one, in fact, I’ve written a couple of them myself, but I guess I’m a bit of a stats junkie as I still read every one I come across. If traffic numbers and conversions aren’t your thing, well don’t say I didn’t warn ya!

Just to catch everyone up, about 5 days ago my article Benefits of a Blog Redesign hit the front page of Digg.com. Traffic went through the roof as the site was hit with what is known as the Digg effect. Luckily, my site was able to withstand the onslaught and as far as I can tell, stayed up the entire time. So, what kind of traffic numbers are we talking about?

Now that’s what I’m talkin about! Actually, from most of my experiences that’s a fairly mild Digg spike since the story hit the front page at 2 a.m. central. Another 1,000 or so visitors found there way here over the next few days as well and in fact, as the story starts to rank in the search engines, previous experience suggests I’ll continue to receive a fairly regular, although small, flow of traffic from the social site. For example, the entry on Digg already ranks #3 in Google for the search phrase “blog redesign”.

While the quality of traffic that Digg sends has been denigrated by countless bloggers and webmasters, I actually picked up about 30 new subscribers and sent well over 100 people to Text Link Ads and another 100 to my John Chow page on the milliondollarwiki. While those percentages aren’t what you’d expect to see from normal traffic, that’s hardly what I would call useless. Considering the fact that none of the 500 StumbleUpon users subscribed or clicked through to TLA, I’ll take Digg’s conversion rates any time.

Perhaps the longest lasting benefit of hitting the front page of Digg, or any other social media site for that matter, is the number of links that follow. Putting your content in front of a large audience of typically young technology inclined people almost always results in links for your site. According to Technorati, I received new links from 25 distinct sites with an average Technorati Authority of nearly 300! Not only will that help increase my Google toolbar PageRank (whenever they get around to updating it) and my Technorati Rankings, it will also help my site rank better in the search engines. Plus, some services such as SponsoredReviews rate your site on the amount of “link pop” it boasts so extra links will often mean extra money.

And there you have it, just about every stat I could think of to pass along about what hitting the front page of Digg did for this site. If you can think of other stats you’d like to see or have other questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll offer up as much information as possible. If you’re wondering how to go about actually GETTING to the front page of Digg, well that’s a matter for another post (or three).

The issue of the social media buttons is one that’s come up in a thread at the Authority Blogger forum. It was suggested that I include some of them obviously in the hopes of increasing the number of submissions or votes for my content. However, I’ve never really found a correlation between including the buttons and increased numbers of votes. I think this subject is probably the makings of another post.

1st up – being the competitive type I’m gonna be gunning for the top commentator spot…

2nd – I just got stumbled (very exciting for me). I read an article on DoshDosh about using link bait, and thought it was an interesting concept… I was having a look at my Revver vids to see their progress, when I noticed a video that had 6,800,000 views – The Simpsons Intro with real people. Anyway as a Revver affiliate and producer, and a Simpsons fan, I decided to put it on my site under my ‘community’ section.

I have received 6000 visitors and counting and I have managed to add 23 subscribers. This is absolutely huge for me, I previously had the odd friend and the obliged girlfriend on my site. This spike has earned me a little ‘dosh’ minute but it represents the first time I have made some money from strangers, rather than ‘kind’ friends…

I’m not sure the ethical implications of using link bait, but I don’t see much of a problem. [Could my morals be plummeting in the face of rampant capital gain] The concent is under creative commons, and you are encouraged to distribute it, it is related to my site, and is something I personally liked.

Not sure if I am allowed to put a link in so I won’t if you would like one I’ll post one. I think that the social sites traffic input and the quality vary, I got stumbled by someone at the Stumble Exchange… So it was not a completely natural stumble but the viral part was… So it was popular content, on the ‘right site’, with a nudge and then traffic? The traffic is tapering of but it hasn’t been a spike really, it is decreasing slowly but not up and down.

Would love to discuss this as I found it very exciting. [My apologies for rambling] What are your thoughts on the matter?

Your site went down after 8,689 uniques? When my “Don’t Block Firefox!” article got big on StumbleUpon and I had around that…and I’m on a 1and1 shared hosting plan. I think I just proved that 1and1 isn’t as bad as their made out to be.

Just a couple of clarifications, I didn’t get 300 new links, I got about 25 new links with an average Technorati Authority of 300. I was just using that to help judge how valuable the links are.

Also, redwall, if you’re talking to me, the site didn’t go down. It performed quite well I thought. I’m pretty sure the main issue is the amount of memory available to your account. There was an article published recently about what actually takes WordPress site’s down when they hit the front page of Digg or get sudden influxes of traffic and if I recall correctly, the main problem was the memory. If for example you’re on shared hosting, it could go just fine as long as another site on the same server isn’t getting a bunch of traffic too.

@ Zane, I’ll my best to cover this last question in a post a bit later on.

The idea of stumble exchanges or digg exchanges is an interesting one. My take on it is this: I think once your content becomes popular on these sites, you’ll find out very quickly whether or not it was good enough to be there. For example hitting digg’s front page is instant exposure but it’s also the fast track to being buried if your content isn’t up to snuff. Now maybe your content wouldn’t have had what it takes to get there naturally but maybe it just needed a little bit of exposure.

“Just to catch everyone up, about 5 days ago my article Benefits of a Blog Redesign hit the front page of Digg.com. Traffic went through the roof as the site was hit with what is known as the Digg effect.”

To quote Wikipedia, “The Slashdot effect is the term given to the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic.”

@redwall no offense but wikipedia isn’t what I would consider reliable. The Slashdot effect is when your site is featured on Slashdot. The Digg effect is when you’re featured on Digg. It’s a fairly common term and usage so I don’t see what clarification is needed. Shoot even the term “JohnChow effect” is being thrown around (usually on his own site).

@Liberty, So far none of them have converted although I believe for publishers to convert they have to have their ads in the system for a week before they count as a conversion. I’m not 100% on that, it could also just be that none of them signed up. I’ll keep you updated.

Recently one of my sites was on the digg front page. A friend of mine submitted it and was nice enough to warn me when it was sitting at 50 diggs.

I took that moment to open up a shell into my server and run TOP. I watched the digg effect happen and continued to monitor it for about an hour later.

The story that got linked is not on my hmtk site but another one and it had to do with Apple, iPhone and hackers.

My server never went down only the MySQL process was affected and it could not keep up with demand. All static sites on my server were fine. All MySQL sites were dead.

As I watched the server load it shot up from my usual .1 – .3 to 60. For those who do not know what that means a 60 means you would need 60 CPUs to handle the load.

It sat at 60 for about 20 minutes. For the first 3 minutes everything was working fine, even at 60. After that it just could not keep up and it would take up to 10 minutes for the server to send you the page.

If you waited long enough the server would send the page but, it was an awful long wait!

Some people did leave comments while the digg effect was in play so I know some people did get access to the site.

Once the server load dropped into the 10 – 20 range the page wait time dropped under 1 minute. 12 hours later I was still sitting with an average server load of 2 – 5.

@Ben – Just out of curiosity are you looking into StumbleUpon as a traffic generator?

It is a very intriguing route – your audience is targeted (the surf through categories as I’m sure you know) it is viral, and I think it works better than Digg in my opinion as it is a more malleable process. Have a look if you have time – I really would appreciate some of your insight into the matter.

PS – This is not to show off (well not totally) but my average for the week is 2000 visitors a day from a single stumbled piece of linkbait.

The questions I have are how to make you site sticky and repeatedly stumbled, as with any social traffic it tapers off. It however has not spiked, it is slowly decreasing (slowly being 7 days – which might be a spike in other peoples books).

|Thanks again for the review – put a blurb up on my site about it. I have already done some of the things you mentioned particularly the sidebar.
LPS – With all this blogging, SEO, commenting, filmmaking – I forgot I was freelance graphics designer… I will be making a ninja/Bruce Lee cabbage mascot – will let you know when it’s up. (Lol)|